Topography: minibus, Waterkant

Painting on a minibus waiting to collect passengers. Photo by Nicholas Laughlin; 24 June, 2009

Project: Jeroen Jongeleen’s “culture hacking”

“Site & Content Specific Art (Practice)”, graffiti by Jeroen Jongeleen in the Palmentuin, Paramaribo; photo courtesy the artist


The Rotterdam-based artist Jeroen Jongeleen, one of the participants in the ArtRoPa exchange programme, spent several weeks in Paramaribo in late 2007 and early 2008. Here the Dutch critic Siebe Thissen describes Jongeleen’s work in Paramaribo, in an excerpt from a longer essay in the Paramaribo SPAN catalogue.

Jeroen Jongeleen’s work in Paramaribo staged an encounter between street images and the visual arts. Jongeleen plastered graffiti slogans in the city where he had spent his youth. With not a little irony, he sprayed the words “art in public spaces” on a neglected little concrete structure in the Palmentuin [Palm Gardens] — a nocturnal haunt for Paramaribo’s junkies.



“Buiten Kunst uit Rotterdam” (“Public Art from Rotterdam”), graffiti by Jeroen Jongeleen in Paramaribo; photo courtesy the artist


Jongeleen also added a monumental feature at the corner of Wanicastraat and Sophie Redmondstraat, close to the US Embassy. UNESCO may have declared Paramaribo’s old, well-preserved city centre a world heritage site, but small wooden workers’ houses, many of which have been neglected, do not enjoy that protection. Jongeleen painted one of those unlisted houses completely white, with window frames in light blue — the colour of UNESCO. His action introduced a new element into the visual culture of Paramaribo: “culture hacking”, or the power of art to react to and comment on the surrounding visual culture.



Painted house at 59 Wanicastraat; photo courtesy the artist

Notes: other canvases

By Christopher Cozier



Kali tattoo, by Pierre Bong a Jan; photo courtesy the artist


The idea of Pierre Bong a Jan using skin as another canvas coincides with the painted decorations on Paramaribo minibuses, reaching out to a larger contemporary public and extending the dialogue about visual production.

The buses and the tattoos, like t-shirts and angisa headkerchiefs, speak with and about the concerns of people living in this space, and also operate far away from traditional art spaces. As suggested by the art historian Kobena Mercer, they become “viral” in their vernacular forms, threatening to infect our much-cherished ideas about “ART”. It’s not just about surfaces, but also about iconography — the meeting point where traditions of body adornment and unlikely mythological confluences play out, as new identities and sensibilities are produced. Where else can a calendar Kali, Botticelli’s Venus, and the stylizations of Vargas or Frazetta meet, if not in Paramaribo?




Handmade tattoo machine; photo courtesy Pierre Bong a Jan


Tapping into a family tradition of ingenuity and self-determination, Bong a Jan has also made his own working tools and devices. His plan to do a live tattoo on the opening night of the SPAN exhibition engages my interest in the less declarative and more provisional implications of exhibitions as events. The artist, within his or her experimental pursuits, creates critical moments that seek to open up or expand our sense of what is possible or expected.

Like the home-manufactured confectionery of Ellen Ligteringen or George Struikelblok’s caged broilers, the event staged or generated is an experience that can live in our mind’s eye, like an encounter with an image — and can be internally processed, devoured, refashioned, and re-enacted. It is a proposal, a question in an ongoing visual conversation. Our presence or response makes or is an active element of the work, as much as we are also incorporated or co-opted within this moment.




Pierre Bong a Jan’s sketchbook, in his tattoo studio; photo courtesy the artist

Seen: Masters of the Game, by Jurgen Lisse

Masters of the Game from Jurgen Lisse on Vimeo.

Masters of the Game is a short video piece by filmmaker Jurgen Lisse, featuring the nimble footwork of a group of young street football players. Using camerawork and editing techniques familiar from music videos, set to a hard-driving soundtrack, it is an artifact of an international urban sensibility with various Paramaribo landmarks as backdrops.

Lisse writes:

“A few boys came to me and asked if I could help them with an intro for their team, Streetskillerz. These talented boys are still in school, and besides school they enjoy and challenge each other with passion and the quickest moves.”

See more of Lisse's short video works at Vimeo.

Concept: "suicide" installation, by Ravi Rajcoomar

Ravi Rajcoomar's SPAN project proposal is an installation commenting on a painful social issue. He explains:

Suicide is a worldwide problem that seems to have no end. Some people take their own lives with hate, then you have terrorists who do it to kill others, and some do it to solve their problems. In recent years there have been many suicides and suicide attempts in Suriname — this is maybe one of the countries with the most suicides. It happens all over the country, but especially in Nickerie.

Everybody keeps talking about this. It got me thinking about what I could do as an artist to get people to reconsider their thoughts of suicide. My idea is to create an installation to encourage discussion.

It will be large box made out of triplex safety glass, with human silhouettes cut out, so you can easily walk through. More silhouetted figures will hang from the roof above. The interior walls will be covered with text, accompanied by a sound installation. The exterior will be bare white.

Reading: on stereotypes, metaphors, and dreams

By Nicholas Laughlin



Sheets of linoleum printed with maps of French Guiana, on sale in Cayenne. Photo by Nicholas Laughlin; 8 April, 2009


[Excerpted and adapted from “Guiana Dreams”, an essay written for the Paramaribo SPAN catalogue. Read the full version here.]


Every place on earth is haunted by stereotypes. But some are more haunted than others, and some places are more tenaciously bound by the metaphors and fictions spun around them.

For the better part of five centuries, the region of South America that we call the Guianas has been tethered in the imagination of the West as a geography to be explored and exploited, endured and adventured in, but not as a place to truly make a home. The Dutch and the English built plantations and ports in their Guiana colonies. The French built prisons. Desired raw materials were shipped out, and undesirable men shipped in. That societies evolved here — hybrid communities where cultural elements from four continents collide and collude — was an accident of history.

Now we find ourselves in what we like to call a postcolonial age, having exchanged flags in a series of midnight ceremonies over the past forty years. But capital-I Independence has not made us less reliant on global economies, whether of finance, trade, or ideas. We depend as much as ever on foreign dollars and attention. And the world’s regard still filters through a persistent swaddle of stories we did not tell, images we did not make.

The predicament might be summarised in a question quoted by the literary scholar Mary Louise Pratt, in Imperial Eyes, her study of the ways travel literature has portrayed Latin America and Africa for European readers. How does “a destination for others” — a place that has been described and depicted mostly by others from elsewhere, with their own missions and prejudices — a place like Suriname, like the Caribbean — become “a home for the self”, for the real women and men who are born here, raise families, and work to achieve safe and comfortable lives? This big question touches on matters of political self-determination, cultural self-assertion, personal self-comprehension, and is specially urgent for those — our artists, our writers — whose labour it is to imagine new stories to replace the old ones that have trapped us.




Sign welcoming visitors to Lethem, Guyana, on the border with Brazil. Photo by Nicholas Laughlin; 7 August, 2005


Artists everywhere grapple with doubts about relevance and audience and income. But in Suriname, in the Caribbean, the smallness of our societies intensifies the struggle. The artist’s options can appear vexing. Fall back on local social networks offering patronage and flattery? Adopt the vocabulary and gestures currently fashionable in foreign academies, and try to catch the eye of a visiting curator? Resort to approved motifs of ancestral heritage and play the role of the “intuitive” or “primitive”, hoping to be recognised as authentically exotic?

Initiatives like ArtRoPa, arranging working exchanges between artists in Suriname and the Netherlands — or like the Wakaman Project, instigating creative partnerships between Surinamese artists at home and abroad — or like Paramaribo SPAN, building a platform to share the work of artists in Suriname with audiences elsewhere — seem to offer the possibility of stepping past the limits of a small place, the chance to infiltrate the wider world with our own metaphors and hopes. But, inevitably, old fictions intervene, and artists often find themselves and their audiences snarled in preconceptions of what Surinamese (or Caribbean) art should look like, what its acceptable subjects might be, how it should “read”, what it could mean.

An artist’s job is to create something meaningful — an object, an experience, a sensation — in the space where personal vision and ambition meet opportunity and social circumstance. The dimensions of that space are constantly shifting, and one way to define an artist’s success is by the range of the creative territory he or she is able to inhabit. For artists from parts of the world that have long been “destinations for others”, the space of potential action, and the ways their work can be received and understood, are bounded by the old imaginary geography. Before we can cross that boundary — or shift it, or erase it — we must both see it and recognise it for what it is: a confining fantasy of the exotic with a long history and a heady allure.

Metaphors have alarming longevity. The New World, five centuries later, is still “new”. To kill a story requires a more powerful story, a more resonant fiction. And re-charting the domain of our hopes and fears — our creative space, our “home for the self” — whether we give that home the name of a nation or a region, Suriname, Guiana, the Caribbean — demands immense and sustained feats of imagination. It demands that we invent new images and new languages to describe and debate our own real world, its scope and its span. It demands powerful and resonant new dreams.




Patriotic footwear, Paramaribo. Photo by Nicholas Laughlin; 29 June, 2009

Notes: on Art of Survival

Image courtesy the Tropenmuseum


The exhibition Art of Survival: Maroon Culture from Suriname opened at the Tropenmuseum (Tropical Museum) in Amsterdam on 6 November, 2009, and runs until 9 May, 2010. Patricia Kaersenhout, an artist with Surinamese roots, based in Amsterdam, made the following notes after visiting the exhibition.

7 January, 2010

I do not have a love-hate relationship with the Tropenmuseum. On the contrary, I like spending hours there. Most of the time, the exhibitions are clear and the materials of high quality, sometimes shown with latest interactive stuff. Maybe I like it because it brings back a memory of the unknown.

In a way it reminds me of the covered tropical beach in Japan, complete with sunset, salt water, waves, sand, palm trees, and a horizon — but covered with a glass roof. An artificial world.

The Tropenmuseum represents an artificial tropical world which, to me — a child of immigrants from Suriname, but raised in a Western European climate — gives a bit of a sense of belonging. I only go there during the winter, when temperatures are low, skies are grey, and streets are wet.

The first thing I noticed entering Art of Survival was the overload of information. I immediately got discouraged, and had to supress the feeling to walk to the bookshop, buy the catalogue, walk to the restaurant, buy a coffee and sandwich, and start reading. I controlled myself, because I had a mission.

When there’s so much information, what sticks in your mind? Where to start? At the beginning, one might say — but it was not so clear where that was. Maybe it was of no importance. I just started somewhere. A touchscreen with a lot of videos and old photographs. The design of the video programme was very good. The explanation clear. It was easy to skip from one film to another. So as a viewer you’re not forced to see the whole film through. One could interrupt the film and go back and repeat an interesting scene.

After scrolling through some films, my eyes got captured by Obu/Wosu: A Life in French Guiana, by Felix de Rooy. The story tells about a Maroon sculptor, Kenneth Soleg Charvein, who lost most of his family at the tragedy of Moiwana. He talks about traditions in his work which he learned from his father. He prefers to work in a group of sculptors, because the world is bigger than we can imagine. “What you didn’t think of yourself will be created by the other.” Very impressive, because it’s in flat contradiction to the individualistic art tradition in which I was educated.

De Jongste Loot is a 1989 documentary by Frank Zichem. It tells the story of a soldier from the national army, Wigo Benton, who is captured by Ronnie Brunswijk. He is an eyewitness to some horrific events, and decides after he’s liberated to go to Holland. It turns out that he doesn’t exist there, because he doesn’t have official documents. One of the things he does to survive is listen to the birds and check if the soil of his little garden is fertile, so he can grow flowers and vegetables. Zooming in on his personal story penetrates the traumatic things that happened during that time in the interior of Suriname, deep in the consciousness of the viewer.

Next to many films and audio presentations, there were beautiful carved wood chairs and combs, woven cloths, and more objects which I won’t try to describe, because there were so many, and I have an ambivalent feeling about exhibiting utilitarian objects, even if they are from another culture. Even though they are well made, it seems rather odd to place them in a museum, looking at them with the serious eye of an interested visitor. Every culture has its right to privacy. I don’t like to peek into someone’s kitchen knowing that the other will never get a chance to see mine.

Among those objects which were supposed to give us an insight into daily life among the Maroons were two very strong artworks by Marcel Pinas. Here the exhibition shows its weakest point. Hanging contemporary art between arts and crafts just doesn’t work. I really like arts and crafts and I really like contemporary art. I just don’t want them to be shown together in such a way that they don’t uplift each other, but take each other down. Efforts to bring those two together often don’t do either of them any good. They are two disciplines which stand on their own. They can influence or inspire each other, but their approach in expression and ideas remains different.

Walking out of the museum, I was confronted by the exhibition poster on a billboard: an image of a black guy photographed half-faced. He’s wearing mirrored sunglasses. They reflect an image of trees and a river. I guess it’s in the interior of Suriname. To me it reflects a longing to be there. To flee from the hell of the European climate into a warm tropical paradise. A longing which Europeans have had since the fifteenth century. The paradox is that the Maroons have to “survive” in what we still see as paradise. But as soon as one has to survive instead of living one’s life, paradise is lost.




Video tour of Art of Survival, courtesy the Tropenmuseum

Diary: a visit to Moengo

Outside the Masanga Restaurant in Moengo, where the Paramaribo SPAN artists met over lunch; photo by Christopher Cozier.


On Tuesday 15 December, 2009, members of the Paramaribo SPAN team — curator Christopher Cozier, writers Chandra van Binnendijk and Marieke Visser, and coordinator Ann Hermelijn — accompanied by a group of Paramaribo-based artists, made a day-trip to the town of Moengo and the nearby village of Moiwana, a couple hours’ drive east of the capital. Moengo is the site of a cultural centre which artist Marcel Pinas is working to establish — long-term plans include a residency programme for visiting artists to work with members of the community. Moengo will also be a satellite site for the Paramaribo SPAN exhibition, opening in February 2010.




A group of artists walking through Moengo; photo by Hedwig de la Fuente


Ellen Ligteringen was one of the artists on the trip. A few days later, she wrote the following note:

“The trip to Moengo and especially the meeting and interacting was really cool (Chris’s word). Listening and responding in a very open way, just the artists’ projects. The meeting felt fertile, like the soil of Suriname. Moengo was a perfect location for this meeting, created by Marcel. We became a part of his project.

“Even on the drive back in the bus we did not stop discussing the projects; we shaped them further, their content and their appearance. Ken Doorson’s project, looking at the red-light area in Paramaribo, was discussed very widely from the men’s point of view, with a lot of jokes. The jokes are a common way to discuss issues, like satire on television in other parts of the world. I’ve never experienced such laughing from the heart in any art programme.”




Bicycle at the side of the road, Moengo; photo by Christopher Cozier



Group shot of the Paramaribo SPAN team and artists; photo by Hedwig de la Fuente



Marcel Pinas at the Moiwana Monument, which he designed to commemorate members of the community killed in the 1986 Moiwana Massacre; photo by Christopher Cozier

Topography: on the outskirts of Paramaribo

The start, middle, or end of a long journey? Bus covered with dust from the red earth roads of the interior of Suriname. Photo by Nicholas Laughlin; 27 June, 2009

A short break

The Paramaribo SPAN blog will take a short hiatus in December and early January, as our team prepares for the opening of the SPAN exhibition in Paramaribo on 26 February, 2010.

Readers on Facebook, feel free to join the Paramaribo SPAN group here, and look out for more information about events on the opening weekend.